


Baby Blues

by TakeninStride



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: And then they get to watch Lance grow up very fast, BABY LANCE, Gen, I promise that baby lance is safe in my hands, M/M, We're going to watch the Paladins try to deal with baby Lance, could be klance near the end of the story, for taytei on tumblr
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-25
Updated: 2018-03-25
Packaged: 2019-04-07 19:35:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14088156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TakeninStride/pseuds/TakeninStride
Summary: After a misunderstanding about what alien "Anti-Aging Cream" really does, the Paladins of Voltron-- and their castle-ship companions-- will be taking care of a baby blue paladin.Inspired by a comic by Taytei on Tumblr.





	Baby Blues

**Author's Note:**

> Hello all and welcome to Dacia's first foray into writing for Voltron. As mentioned in my summary, this fic was entirely inspired by Taytei's comic over on Tumblr.
> 
> (http://taytei.tumblr.com/post/172179354336/yeaaa-ive-completely-forgone-trying-to-make-this)

Keith startled awake, the fleeting memory of his nightmare followed him into consciousness. His ears rang as he tried to calm himself. It was just a dream. But there was so much blood, so many bodies, so much screaming…  
  
Screaming... He could definitely still hear it.  
  
He shook his head to clear the daze of sleepiness, and threw himself over the edge of his bed, readying himself for a fight. Had the castle been attacked? What was going on? Why weren’t the alarms sounding?  
  
The cadences of the blood-curdling yell fell off as Keith fell into the dark and empty hallway. A loud wailing soon followed. Cautiously, the others started poking their heads out of their doors with soft ‘ _what’s going on?_ ’s and ‘ _what is that?_ ’s.  
  
Allura hadn’t taken to the internal coms at all, and there was no other sound of fighting happening around the castle: no explosions against shields, no alarms… just a single loud cry from Lance’s room. Keith bristled—he didn’t know what was up with the Blue Paladin but he should have known this level of obnoxious noise could only come from Lance. However, his gut immediately sank when the high-pitched wailing caught and stuttered a couple of times before continuing into loud sobs. His temper faded as quickly as it came.  
  
Lance, for all of his volume, was usually very quiet and reserved about emotional problems. Something was wrong. Keith just didn’t know what. He approached the door and held his hand out to the others, signalling for them to stand down. He knocked gently at the door.  
“Lance? It’s Keith.”  
  
The crying continued.  
  
“Uh, hey, are you okay?” Keith tried, louder this time to cut over the noise.  
  
The only response he got was more wailing. He turned in the direction of Shiro’s room and shook his head. Shiro shooed him on, concern written all over his face. Keith took a deep breath and steeled himself for his eminent role as an emotional anchor. _Why do I have to do this? Pidge and Hunk are much closer friends with Lance, shouldn’t they be the ones investigating this?_  
  
Regardless, he keyed the door open. “Hey, I’m coming in okay?”  
  
He slowly turned up the light dimmer after stepping in. He scoped the small barracks out; the bed was made, the room was relatively clean, and the light from the bathroom shone bright through the crack at the bottom of the door.  
  
Keith washed, rinsed, and repeated his previous attempt at talking to Lance through a closed door but his inquiries did nothing to quell the banshee hiding in the bathroom. The others had crept over to the bedroom’s door, worried and curious about their friend’s distress.  
  
Keith slid the bathroom door open, and slowly peeked in, praying that Lance had had the foresight to make himself decent before having a huge breakdown. But nothing could have prepared him for what was on the other side of the door.  
  
Curled up on the bathroom tile, blanketed in a blue shirt, and red in the face was a small, screaming baby.  
  
\------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
After staring at a screaming baby for a solid minute without moving, the others had come to see what had Keith so confused. Their responses weren't much better.  
  
“Where did Lance get a human baby?”  
  
“Do you think he stole it?”  
  
“FROM WHOM HUNK??? WE HAVEN’T SEEN ANOTHER HUMAN BEING SINCE WE FOUND MY FAMILY.”  
  
“Yeah, okay, you have a valid point, but how in the world could there be a real human baby on this ship **unless** he stole it.”  
  
“Is it, perhaps, his?”  
  
“Allura, how could it be his?”  
  
“…Progenation…?”  
  
“Pretty sure I’m the only one here who could like… ”biologically” help with that, and one? Absolutely not; not in a million years. And two? I’m pretty sure we all would have noticed if I’d gotten pregnant and, I dunno, pushed out a baby or something, _before_ we found it lying on Lance’s bathroom floor?”  
  
“W-well I don’t know, then. There are plenty of lifeforms that can reproduce asexually…? Could this not be the case?”  
  
“Not for humans.”  
  
“Little guy looks just like Lance though. Maybe it _could_ be his…”  
  
“Hunk, are you trying to tell me that our Lance managed to actually woo an alien, managed to overcome the unbelievable odds of being re-productively compatible with said alien, and managed to smuggle the baby into the castle without any of us noticing? The last time we even had contact with another planet was 3 days ago. I think we would have heard this little guy going off way sooner…”  
  
“Okay while we’re on topic of _hearing_ said baby, maybe we should pick him up off the ground…”  
  
“Oh yeah. Good call, Shiro.”  
  
Shiro swaddled the baby in the shirt around it and hefted it up into his normal arm. A little coochie-coo here and some tummy tickles later and the small handful of distress turned to a little ball of snuffling giggles. Everyone seemed to relax once the auditory assault ceased.  
  
“That’s much better. Now where IS Lance, anyway?” Shiro asked.  
  
After a group-wide shrug, Allura made for the door. “I can go ring the coms!”  
  
Hunk was hot on her heels. “Pidge, let’s go check the kitchens. See if maybe he was trying to get some food goo for the hungie lil’ guy.”  
  
“Coran, could you go check the infirmary? Maybe he went to check for supplies?”  
  
“Sure thing, Shiro! On my way!”  
  
Once the others had cleared out, Shiro held the small bundle out towards Keith. He awkwardly received the baby in both arms and tried rocking him gently when his face scrunched up reflexively. Shiro turned back into the bathroom and picked up the discarded clothes from the floor.  
  
“What’s that?” Keith asked, peering around the Black Paladin. Under the pair of pants was what looked like a toothpaste tube. The cap was on, but the indents in the package made it look used. Shiro picked it up and turned it over in his hand.  
  
“Dunno. I can’t read it.”  
  
Allura’s voice sounded on the coms. “ _Lance, please report to your barracks. I repeat, Lance, please report to your barracks._ ”  
  
Not much later, Hunk and Pidge returned Lance-less, but brought some Kaltenecker delight as well as a drowsy Matt. Coran turned up Lance-less as well, but brought a small blue onesie and a package of ‘morbsmoks’. Those turned out to be the Altean equivalent of diapers. When Allura returned to the room alone, everyone started getting restless.  
  
“Where **is** he?” Hunk asked.  
  
“I’ll go fetch the surveillance footage and see if I can’t track him down,” Coran said, saluting before leaving again. While they waited, Allura applied the morbsmok, Shiro fitted the little one in the onesie, and Hunk carefully spooned some milk to the baby; all the while bemoaning the fact that they didn’t have a bottle for the baby to suckle on instead. Coran returned, his mustache slanted at a perplexed angle.  
  
“Well I tracked Lance’s movements across the ship. It seems he entered his room a couple vargas ago but then he never left…”  
  
“He… never left?  
  
“Nope, m‘fraid not. We don’t have surveillance in the barracks, for obvious reasons of course, but I watched him enter from the hall and sped through the night’s footage after that. Didn’t see a single spec move after his door closed!”  
  
Pidge hummed at this. “I don’t think Lance has the know-how to trick regular security cameras, let alone the Altean systems. The timestamps didn’t jump suddenly did they? Maybe he figured out how to crop something out.”  
  
Coran shook his head. “Nope, checked for that too. Smooth sailing down to every tick. No sign of doctorin’ either in the logs.”  
  
Everyone looked around the room, as if Lance could have very well blended into the walls and was waiting to hit them with a big ‘gotchya’. However, he was clearly absent.  
  
Something started ticking off in Keith’s mind. He thought back over the day. They were currently en-route to an alliance planet, and hadn’t encountered any Galra interference. They’d been ship-bound all day. Lance had seemed fine; he'd told loud stories in the lounge, complained about being cooped up on the deck, went through a decent sprint of training… the usual. He’d been wearing the blue shirt and dark grey jeans they’d found on the bathroom floor. Keith quickly diverted from thinking about Lance’s clothes any more than he already had today, and continued through his timeline. After dinner, Lance decided to turn in, which isn’t unusual. The boy usually takes care of his long skin care routine in the evenings and insists on getting a minimum of 8 hours of sleep a night. Fast forward to the yelling baby, Lance’s clothes on the floor, and then the face cream.  
  
The face cream…  
  
“Hey Allura?”  
  
“Yes, Keith?”  
  
“Do you happen to know what this says?” Keith asked suspiciously, retrieving the tube that Shiro had uncovered, and tossing it over to the Princess.  
  
She took a moment to read it over, squinting at the small text. Suddenly her eyes widened and she looked up at the group. “Oh dear…”  
  
“What is it?” Shiro asked.  
  
“It’s… an anti-aging formula. Lance had inquired about it when we were on Oplicent the other day… I told him what it was, though, so I don’t know why he would have picked it up…”  
  
The humans exchanged a confused look. Hunk’s brows furrowed as he turned to address the Princess. “Anti-aging cream? That… seems like a perfectly reasonable product for Lance to purchase. Why are you surprised that he’d get it?”  
  
She seemed taken aback at his question, “ _Anti-Aging formula_? Why would Lance have any use for a product that reduces your mind and body to a younger age? And why in the world would he use so MUCH of it?”  
  
“Wait. Anti-aging cream from Oplicent literally reverts your biological clock?” Pidge asked, dumb-struck. When Allura nodded, Pidge started cackling hysterically. The other humans hid their faces in their hands with long groans.  
  
“Does it mean something different on Earth?” Allura asked, voice and expression full of incredulous confusion.  
  
“Yeah,” Hunk scrubbed at the scruff on his cheeks, “On Earth it’s like a lotion that’s supposed to stop your skin from wrinkling, or whatever, since that’s what happens to us when we get older…so anti-aging products are like... preventative.”  
  
Shiro gently lifts the baby over his head and big, familiar blue eyes shine down at him, even if the skin around is puffy and raw. “Well, it looks like we found you, Lance. You never left your room after all.”  
  
“This isn’t… permanent… is it?” Keith asked. “We don’t exactly have time for him to grow up again to finish this war.”  
  
“Oh no,” Allura assured. “We’ll have to run some minor tests on the formula to see how much he ended up using and to determine its potency. Then we can work backwards to figure out how long it should take for it to wear off.”  
  
“Wait is it going to like gradually wear off? Will we watch him grow up in a couple of days or will it just be like ‘oo goo I’m baby Wance’ to BOOM normal Lance, all at once? I dunno if I wanna see that... Seems like it would be painful. Like anytime a werewolf transforms, you know? That could be pretty traumatic. Especially for a baby.” Hunk shuddered at the thought.  
  
Allura blinked at the Yellow Paladin, “Well, I’m not sure what 'werewolf's are like, nor how they transform, but I imagine this works like most of the other anti-aging formulas. The affected individual will slowly grow back into the age they were when the cream was first applied.”  
  
Hunk let out a sigh of relief. “Oh thank goodness.”  
  
“Aww this means we get to see little Lance grow up! We'll get to see him before we met him at the Garrison!” Pidge enthused earnestly.  
  
Shiro looked bemused as well, “Well then. Let’s start running those tests on the formula to see how long it’ll take to get him back. While he’s out of commission, Allura, we’ll need you to pilot Blue. In the meantime, it looks like we’ve all got a baby to take care of.”

**Author's Note:**

> Please feel free to like, comment, review, or suggest edits. I did not have a beta reader for this chapter and I wrote it in a few hours so it's probably riddled with grammatical and tense errors. Also feel free to leave suggestions about what you wanna see from baby Lance!


End file.
